What does it feel like to experience your body cleaving into two or more while listening to lawyers, judges, pundits, and politicians center debates about reproductive healthcare around the viability line, the fantasized moment when any fetus could be extracted from the uterus and survive? What form of subjectivity is produced by the recurrent practice of scrolling through photographs of children crushed in war while a baby sleeps beside you, indistinguishable from the dead children in expression and bodily habit?
This Watery Place departs from author Emma Heaney’s experiences to address these questions, which are situated between the particular historical moment of her pregnancies, of any individual pregnancy, and the transhistorical continuities of the sensations, emotions, socialities, and conceptual provocations that have long accompanied gestation. The book centers the embodied realities that are often mystified in the sentimentalizing of motherhood, a process that enables the material abandonment of those who do the labor of gestation and care, and, indeed of children. As a result, gestation is revealed as a process against cisness, wage work, and the death cult of war.
Innehållsförteckning
Introduction: Fetal Separability
1. Is a Cervix Cis? My Year in the Stirrups
2. This Watery Place
3. The Hydraulics of Provision
Coda: Swimming in the Waters of the World
Om författaren
Emma Heaney is the author of The New Woman (Northwestern UP, 2017) and the editor of the collection Feminism Against Cisness [Duke UP, 2023]. She received her Ph D in Comparative Literature from The University of California, Irvine and is Associate Director and Clinical Assistant Professor of Literature and Philosophy in the XE Program in Experimental Humanities at New York University. Her writing has appeared in Aster(ix) Journal, The Tampa Review, and many academic journals and edited collections. She lives in Queens with her partner Lena Afridi and their daughters.
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